News tagged with herds

Food manufacturers and restaurants are taking the dairy industry by the horns on an animal welfare issue that's long bothered activists but is little known to consumers: the painful removal of budding horn ...

Sheepdogs use just two simple rules to round up large herds of sheep, scientists have discovered. The findings could lead to the development of robots that can gather and herd livestock, crowd control techniques, ...

The wild bison roaming Catalina Island are a major attraction for the nearly 1 million tourists who visit the Channel Island's most popular destination every year. But managing the number of bison so that ...

Respiratory diseases in cattle are a great threat to animal welfare and lead to financial losses in the cattle industry. The bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV) is one of the main causes of respiratory ...

Kassahun Wondim's PhD research shows that the protozoan parasite, N. caninum, is a more frequent cause of miscarriage and stillbirth in intensive and semi-intensive dairy production in Ethiopia than the BVD ...

The introduction of young dairy goats into an existing herd is stressful for all animals involved. Rank fights and aggressive behaviour can further result in injury. Researchers at the University of Veterinary ...

Officials in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa seized almost one and a half tonnes of ivory hacked out of poached elephants, they said Wednesday, the latest in a series of seizures by Kenyan authorities.

Herd

Herd refers to a social grouping of certain animals of the same species, either wild or domestic, and also to the form of collective animal behavior associated with this (referred to as herding) or as a verb, to herd, to its control by another species such as humans or dogs.

The term herd is generally applied to mammals, and most particularly to the grazing ungulates that classically display this behaviour. Different terms are used for similar groupings in other species; in the case of birds, for example, the word is flocking, but flock may also be used, in certain instances, for mammals, particularly sheep or goats. A group of quail is often referred to as a covey. Large groups of carnivores are usually called packs, and in nature a herd is classically subject to predation from pack hunters.

Special collective nouns may be used for particular taxa (for example a flock of geese, if not in flight, is sometimes called a gaggle) but for theoretical discussions of behavioural ecology, the generic term herd can be used for all such kinds of assemblage.[citation needed]

The word herd, as a noun, can also refer to one who controls, possesses and has care for such groups of animals when they are domesticated. Examples of herds in this sense include shepherds (who tend to sheep), goatherds (who tend to goats), cowherds (who tend cattle), and others.